


Even Stone Crumbles

by Fordanoia



Category: Gravity Falls
Genre: (i mean this probably counts as mental breakdown), Angst, Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Canon Divergence - A Tale of Two Stans, Crying, Emotional Hurt/Comfort, Gen, Mental Breakdown, Paranoid Ford Pines, Touch-Starved
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-13
Updated: 2020-08-13
Packaged: 2021-03-05 21:22:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,342
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25872052
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fordanoia/pseuds/Fordanoia
Summary: It is an unfortunate thing to have a day where you just keep crying. It is even worse when every time you cry, you don't actually feel any better. (It's also especially worse when you're sleep deprived and haven't had any good, physical touch in months)Stan shows up when Ford is having one of those days.
Relationships: Ford Pines & Stan Pines
Comments: 15
Kudos: 193





	Even Stone Crumbles

**Author's Note:**

> If you're reading this again and seeing this note, s u r p r I s e I added more.

Ford walked towards the front door after he heard the knock, picking up the crossbow before preparing to undo the locks. 

On another day, another week even, he would have cared about being seen with such obviously red rimmed eyes, about whatever possible enemy from Bill thinking he was vulnerable.

Hell if he cared about that now.

The past several hours, Ford had continually been on the verge of tears. Not pushing back on the urge to cry, but simply that the tears were perpetually there at the surface, ready to slip out at a moment’s notice.

After the second or third time, he'd given up on stopping the silent tears and even the very rare, and brief sob. It didn’t matter if he cried or not. Even if he did put in the effort to reign it back, he’d only have to do it again moments later. The same feelings, pains, and stresses were still just as present regardless of what he did and the tears simply slid out of their own accord, no emotional instigation needed. It was just his reality today.

With tears down his face, he'd put new grounds into his coffee machine or mark his way across another book. He barely bothered to wipe his face dry since it usually only resulted in shortly after more tears slipping down anyhow. After the first few hours, his eyes had gotten sore and burned a little alongside a constant pressure in his head. 

It was his new normal now, and frankly, it could have been a lot worse. At least this didn’t hurt.

With a hand on the door knob, Ford swung open the front door and immediately followed it with the crossbow aimed straight out. 

On the other end of the crossbow, Stan jumped slightly at the weapon. "Oh, wow. Great to see you too." He said sarcastically.

Ford lowered the crossbow, second guessing himself as he unstrung the bolt with a flash of a glance past Stan, his thoughts scratching around the inside of his skull with leaving himself open with someone right there, in easy lunging, stabbing, _slicing_ \- in easy reaching distance of him. 

He forced himself to ignore the thoughts as much as he could right now. "Did anyone follow you?" He asked, setting the crossbow down.

"What? No, no one..." Stan lapsed into silence when Ford met his eyes again, looking uncomfortably unprepared. "Uh."

Surprisingly, not even the obvious reaction from Stan was enough to make Ford actually care about trying to save some face. It did give himself a window of opportunity though.

"Hold still." Ford said, grabbing his pen light and flashing it into Stan's eyes while he was caught off guard, watching the pupils retract and relaxing slightly. He clicked the light off.

Stan squinted against the light, but at least didn't move away from it until Ford was done. "What was _that_?" 

"An eye exam." Ford answered, stepping back into the house. "Here, inside."

"Are you-" Stan paused, stepping in and shutting the door after himself. "What's going on?" 

The locks. None of the locks were done. Anyone could-

Predictably a few stray tears gathered at the corner of his eyes. Ford reached past Stan to quickly pull over the dead bolt and a latch with one hand, just as quickly retracting again so he was out of Stan's space again. 

"I don't have a lot of time." Ford said, going down the hallway and gesturing for Stan to follow him. He pulled the sleeve at his arm back to check the watch on his wrist as he went down the hallway. He still didn’t know the precise day, but it was midday which meant everyone in town would be awake. Good. Less of a chance of Bill possessing someone else right now.

"Is everything- okay, well hell, obviously not " Stan said starting and cutting off his own question as he followed Ford into the living room. "Ford, what's wrong?"

Ford started to search around the room for where he'd left the journal, and tears streamed out and down his face when he talked. "I made a mistake." He explained in a calm voice, not stopping in his search. "A cataclysmic error. I've run out of options and there's no one here I can trust."

He found the journal under a pile of incomprehensible stacks of papers on the desk. He pulled the journal out from underneath it all and set it on the corner, turning through the papers for anything of worth, ignoring the tear drop that had already managed to fall onto one of them. 

"Okay, okay, hey." Stan said gently, coming up beside him on his left to the table. "Hey, just stop for a second." 

Ford tensed slightly at the close proximity as Stan came up beside him. When he glanced over though, Stan was looking at his face rather than where his hands were moving over the papers so Ford continued what he was doing.

"Stop what?" He asked calmly, focusing back on the papers and quickly sorting though what was there. It was all nearly useless, which wasn't new.

"Stop- Ford, you're-" Stan faltered around the words, and ended up not saying anything. 

Ford paused what he was doing to tiredy look back at Stan.

While Ford didn't care about the lines of tears running down his face, Stan was looking at them and really just over Ford's whole face with a mix of discomfort and worry. "You're- I don't know, stop thinking about the mistake or whatever it is you're thinking about, okay." He said and lightly gestured at Ford's face. "Hell, Ford you're..."

"I'm aware."

Stan was oddly mute, at an uncharacteristic loss of what to say, and Ford had nothing more to add.

Ford patiently waited a moment or two, the two of them stuck silently looking at one another, before he moved the conversation on himself.

"I have something downstairs to show you." He said, turning back to the table and placing the few papers worth anything onto the journal. 

"Stanford, come on." An unfamiliar, warm weight pressed over Ford's shoulder - a hand. "Look, just... just talk to me. Whatever's going on."

When the hand on his shoulder squeezed, gentle and not painful, Ford’s hands clenched on the table and a fresh wave of tears, heavy this time, fell. All at once, he started to crack apart anew.

The contact simultaneously made him both aware of every fissure running through him like it had just been made, and was also the only thing right now that felt like it was keeping him together even if only a little bit. And it was a real touch and not a phantom one that felt like nothing but the theory of contact which was never enough and if anything just made him feel even emptier and more alone and- 

and Ford couldn't keep it together, his face twisting with emotion as it hit him at full force. He pressed a hand against his forehead to the pressure there.

"Hey, it's okay. Whatever it is we can figure it out, alright?"

A sob took Ford by surprise, sudden and just as sudden came another one after that. He screwed his eyes shut, pushing his glasses up to press the heel of his hand to one of his eyes. 

"Shit. Okay, okay, hey, it's okay. It's okay." Stan said quickly. 

He felt his glasses taken the rest of the way off of his face before hands on his arms turned him to the side. Then there were arms wrapping around him in a hug. "Come here, okay. It's okay."

Ford opened his arms to wrap around Stan’s back, letting himself grab hold of him.

"There you go, there. See?” Stan kept talking, the voice a comfort even as he heard Stan’s own distress within it. “See, everything's okay. It's going to be okay."

Ford buried his face over Stan's shoulder, crying on quiet sobs as the pressure and warmth held him together in one piece.


End file.
